Britain's Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron and his wife Samantha pause to pose for photographers and television cameras as they leave after casting their votes at a polling station in central London, Thursday, May 22, 2014. Voters in 28 countries on Thursday begin choosing the next European Parliament and helping determine the EU's future leaders and course. Around 400 million Europeans are eligible to take part in what is termed the world's largest cross-border exercise in representative democracy. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, poses for a selfie with supporters as his bodyguard stand watch after casting his vote at a polling station in a school in The Hague, Netherlands, Thursday, May 22, 2014. Prominent Euroskeptic Wilders said he hopes for a higher-than-usual turnout in the Netherlands. From May 22-25, hundreds of millions of people from the European Union's 28 member countries will vote for members of the European Parliament, one of the EU's two legislative bodies. (AP Photo/Phil Nijhuis)

BRUSSELS — Starting with Britain and the Netherlands, Europe began voting Thursday for a new European Parliament, an election in which fringe parties of the right and left are expected to capitalize on low voter turnout and anger over immigration and anemic economies in the wake of the financial crisis.

Results will not be officially announced until Sunday night, but exit polls cited by Dutch news media late Thursday indicated that the far-right Party of Freedom, led by anti-immigration maverick Geert Wilders, had performed less well than forecast. In a 10-party Dutch race, Wilders’ party, weakened by campaign blunders and infighting, placed third or fourth behind solidly pro-European political forces, worse than its second-place finish at the last European elections in 2009, Dutch news media reported.

Whether the expected success for the fringe parties elsewhere marks a lasting shift in Europe — or whether it will die away in future elections — the results may provide Europe’s extremists an outsized platform to influence the politics of their home nations and beyond. With centrist groups struggling to contain radicals on both flanks, the new Parliament is expected to have more populist lawmakers than ever from parties opposed to free trade and European integration.

One thing it may well do, for example, is derail a trans-Atlantic trade pact that both the U.S. and European Union have been pushing as a spur to economic growth. The Parliament has rejected agreements with the U.S. in the past, but nothing on this scale.

That prospect brings into focus the growing importance of an assembly that, according to opinion polls, nonetheless may have less public support than ever and has yet to escape its reputation as a refuge for has-beens and never-will-bes who would have trouble winning office in their home countries.

“The extremists risk exaggerating the reaction of the new Parliament to the relative economic decline of Europe — not by making Europe more humble or cooperative but by making it more confrontational and less willing to reciprocate,” said Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Center for International Political Economy, a research group in Brussels. “That is a toxic mix for provoking big commercial fights with other parts of the world, including with the United States.”

The election holds the potential to sow widespread political uncertainty and even turmoil. The four days of voting in 28 nations for the 751-member assembly could deliver significant gains for the anti-European U.K. Independence Party led by Nigel Farage. Similarly Euroskeptic parties could top the polls in France and Italy, where voting takes place Sunday, when all results will be officially announced.

These far-right and far-left groups will not win anything approaching enough seats to take control. But they could get around a quarter of them, amplifying their voice in debate and giving them more opportunities to slow down measures that the Brussels bureaucracy and international economists say could help save Europe from a Japan-style “lost decade” of anemic growth and policy stasis.

These include initiatives to bind the 18 countries that use the euro currency closer together and open up Europe’s markets to greater competition, including from the U.S.

Set up in the 1950s as a common assembly to introduce an element of democracy into the nascent European project, the Parliament became directly elected in 1979 as part of a push to narrow the chasm between Europeans and the arcane work of integrating their economies that few ordinary people cared about and even fewer could understand.

Instead, the Parliament, which sits in both Brussels and the French city of Strasbourg 270 miles away, has increasingly become a forum for politicians bent on subverting, not fixing, the EU. And while its powers have steadily grown, public interest and support have steadily waned.

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